A Piece of Steak

From the opening lines of the story, London establishes the theme of hunger and poverty. Tom King is eating his “last morsel of bread” in a “slow and meditative way” (1), as if to savor it. Even after eating his food, he remains “distinctly hungry.” The text returns to this theme later during the fight when Tom, “in a flash of bitterness,” thinks about the piece of steak and wishes “that he had it then behind that necessary punch he must deliver” (16). Indeed, Tom blames his defeat on the steak he did not have. “It was all because of that piece of steak,” he thinks to himself (17). Meat takes on other significance in the text as well, as Tom’s purpose in the fight is to bring home meat to his family. He imagines his walk to the Gayety as him going “out into the night to get meat for his mate and cubs […] in the old, primitive, royal, animal way, by fighting for it” (4). Meat is the prize of the fight but also the cause of his loss: He must win the fight to bring home meat, but he needs meat in order to win the fight. Food thus comes to represent the cyclical reality of poverty. Tom is behind on rent and unable to work due to his age, his lack of skills, and, by the end of the story, his boxing injuries. He can only get money by fighting, but his own poverty limits him there as well; he cannot afford to eat properly, let alone train properly.

This is not the only cycle the story depicts. For one, the story itself is cyclical, with Tom thinking about steak in the first scene and the last, ending up exactly back where he started. Beyond that, the other big theme is the cycle of aging. This emerges through Tom repeatedly saying that “Youth will be served” (14). The text often capitalizes “Youth” as though it were its own character, and Tom implies that his enemy in the fight is not Sandel but youth itself; Tom cannot win the fight because he cannot eat, yes, but also because he’s well past his prime. He notes that, for a 40-year-old fighter like himself, “[I]t is harder to get into condition than when he [was] twenty” (3). By contrast, Sandel, “Youth incarnate,” just does not seem to tire out. While Tom attempts to employ the wisdom his age has afforded him, saving every ounce of energy as Sandel wastes his, Sandel just keeps swinging; he is able to recover his strength between rounds because his whole body is “acrawl with life” (8). Whereas Tom’s visible arteries have hardened, Sandel’s blood pumps freely. His body has not yet “oozed its freshness out through the aching pores during the long fights” (8). Those kinds of fights are the ones that cost Tom his youth.

The story suggests that men’s bodies eventually just break down. That is certainly the case for Tom, who knows he “[is] an old un, and the world [does] not wag well with old uns” (5). This is part of a cycle too. Tom thinks back to when he was a younger fighter rising through the ranks by “putting away” the “old uns” of his day: he was “Youth rising, and they were Age, sinking” (5). Sandel is merely starting the same journey Tom has already been on: beating old boxers so he can work his way up to better bouts, better purses, better venues, and better meals. Tom especially remembers Stowsher Bill, a fighter he beat who cried “like a baby” in the dressing room after the bout (5). Only now does Tom realize that Bill was probably like he himself currently is—broke and broken-down. At the end of the story, Tom cries, completing a cycle in which Tom becomes Bill and Sandel becomes Tom. The implication is that even Sandel’s glory (though nascent) will end in the same cruel fate.

The world of “A Piece of Steak'' is harsh and unforgiving. This story is an example of naturalism, a literary genre popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Naturalists sought to capture an extreme realism and believed that one’s environment dictated who they were. Many naturalist writers took their cues from the theory of evolution, endorsing the social Darwinist theory that humans and human society are subject to the laws that govern nature, particularly survival of the fittest. This story makes that belief clear, using the ring as a symbol of the world at large. The ring is a place of brutality, but it’s also a place Tom understands because both fighters know their roles. The stakes of the match are simple: The stronger survives and wins. The rest of the world works the same way, but in that world, Tom has never been the strongest. He has no skills and no real intelligence or education to speak of; his age and physical condition are also burdens stacked against him. As if to cement the social Darwinist view of the world, the text often describes Tom in animalistic ways. He has the “lion-like” eyes “of a fighting animal” (2), and in the fight with Sandel, one of his punches resembles “a sleepy-seeming lion suddenly thrusting out a lightning paw” (11). Even his name—Tom King—suggests that he used to be, like a lion, king of the jungle.

Despite the metaphorical flourishes, this story is firmly rooted in realism. To enhance the verisimilitude, London makes use of dialect throughout the story. While the narrative action unfolds in normal prose, London captures the characters’ accents in their dialogue. For example, early in the story Tom asks his wife about what the butcher told her. “G’wan! Wot’d he say?” he asks, and she replies, “As how 'e was thinkin' Sandel ud do ye to-night, an' as how yer score was comfortable big as it was” (3). The couple’s working-class accents admittedly make it harder to understand what they are saying, but they provide additional information about them that normal speech tags might not convey. In this case, dialect makes it clear that Tom and his wife are not from an educated or wealthy background. It also makes the characters seem more real, as the reader does not “hear” London’s voice but rather the characters’. Tom’s thoughts too often employ dialect. For example, on the way to the fight he thinks, he “[is] an old un, and the world [does] not wag well with old uns” (5). This too separates the narrator’s words from Tom’s own and draws the reader closer to Tom. The third person limited narration gains added realism by conveying Tom’s thoughts and words as they would appear in reality.